I had intended to write a short pamphlet on the subject
indicated in the title on the occasion of the second anniversary
of Soviet power. But owing to the rush of everyday work I have so
far been unable to get beyond preliminary preparations for some of
the sections. I have therefore decided to essay a brief,
summarised exposition of what, in my opinion, are the most
essential ideas on the subject. A summarised exposition, of
course, possesses many disadvantages and
shortcomings. Nevertheless, a short magazine article may perhaps
achieve the modest aim in view, which is to present the problem
and the groundwork for its discussion by the Communists of various
countries.

1

Theoretically, there can be no doubt that between capitalism
and communism there lies a definite tranition period which must
combine the features and properties of both these forms of social
economy. This transition period has to be a period of struggle
between dying capitalism and nascent communism—or, in other
words, between capitalism which has been defeated but not
destroyed and communism which has been born but is still very
feeble.

The necessity for a whole historical era distinguished by
these transitional features should be obvious not only to
Marxists, but to any educated person who is in any degree
acquainted with the theory of development. Yet all the talk on the
subject of the transition to socialism which
we hear from present-day petty-bourgeois democrats (and such, in
spite of their spurious socialist label, are all the leaders of
the Second International, including such individuals as
MacDonald, Jean Longuet, Kautsky and Friedrich Adler) is marked
by complete disregard of this obvious truth. Petty-bourgeois
democrats are distinguished by an aversion to class struggle, by
their dreams of avoiding it, by their efforts to smooth over, to
reconcile, to remove sharp corners. Such democrats, therefore,
either avoid recognising any necessity for a whole historical
period of transition from capitalism to communism or regard it
as their duty to concoct schemes for reconciling the two
contending forces instead of leading the struggle of one of
these forces.

2

In Russia, the dictatorship of the proletariat must inevitably
differ in certain particulars from what it would be in the
advanced countries, owing to the very great backwardness and
petty-bourgeois character of our country. But the basic
forces—and the basic forms of social economy— are the
same in Russia as in any capitalist country, so that the
peculiarities can apply only to what is of lesser importance.

The basic forms of social economy are capitalism, petty
commodity production, and communism. The basic forces are the
bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie (the peasantry in particular)
and the proletariat.

The economic system of Russia in the era of the dictatorship
of the proletariat represents the struggle of labour, united on
communist principles on the scale of a vast state and making its
first steps—the struggle against petty commodity production
and against the capitalism which still persists and against that
which is newly arising on the basis of petty commodity
production.

In Russia, labour is united communistically insofar as, first,
private ownership of the means of production has been abolished,
and, secondly, the proletarian state power is organising
large-scale production on state-owned land and in state-owned
enterprises on a national scale, is distributing labour-power
among the various branches of production and the various
enterprises, and is distributing among the working people large
quantities of articles of consumption belonging to the state.

We speak of “the first steps” of communism in
Russia (it is also put that way in our Party Programme adopted in
March 1919), because all these things have been only partially
effected in our country, or, to put it differently, their
achievement is only in its early stages. We accomplished
instantly, at one revolutionary blow, all that can, in general, be
accomplished instantly; on the first day of the dictatorship of
the proletariat, for instance, on October 26 (November 8),1917,
the private ownership of land was abolished without compensation
for the big landowners— the big landowners were
expropriated. Within the space of a few months practically all the
big capitalists, owners of factories, joint-stock companies,
banks, railways, and so forth, were also expropriated without
compensation. The state organisation of large-scale production in
industry and the transition from “workers’
control” to “workers’ management” of
factories and railways— this has, by and large, already been
accomplished; but in relation to agriculture it has only just
begun ("state farms”, i.e., large farms organised by the
workers’ state on state owned land). Similarly, we have only
just begun the organisation of various forms of co-operative
societies of small farmers as a transition from petty commodity
agriculture to communist agriculture.[1] The same must be said
of the state-organised distribution of products in place-of
private trade, i.e., the state procurement and delivery of grain
to the cities and of industrial products to the
countryside. Available statistical data on this subject will be
given below.

Peasant farming continues to be petty commodity
production. Here we have an extremely broad and very sound,
deep-rooted basis for capitalism, a basis on which capitalism
persists or arises anew in a bitter struggle against
communism. The forms of this struggle are private speculation and
profiteering versus state procurement of grain (and other
products) and state distribution of products in general.

3

According to the figures of the People’ s Commissariat
of Food, state procurements of grain in Russia between August 1,
1917, and August 1, 1918, amounted to about 30,000,000 poods, and
in the following year to about 110,000,000 poods. During the first
three months of the next campaign (1919-20) procurements will
presumably total about 45,000,000 poods, as against 37,000,000
poods for the same period (August-October) in 1918.

These flgures speak clearly of a slow but steady improvement
in the state of affairs from the point of view of the victory of
communism over capitalism. This improvement is being achieved in
spite of difficulties without world parallel, difficulties due to
the Civil War organised by Russian and foreign capitalists who are
harnessing all the forces of the world’s strongest
powers.

Therefore, in spite of the lies and slanders of the
bourgeoisie of all countries and of their open or masked henchmen
(the “socialists” of the Second International), one
thing remains beyond dispute—as far as the basic economic
problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat is concerned, the
victory of communism over capitalism in our country is
assured. Throughout the world the bourgeoisie is raging and fuming
against Bolshevism and is organising military expeditions, plots,
etc., against the Bolsheviks, because it realises full well that
our success in reconstructing the social economy is inevitable,
provided we are not crushed by military force. And its attempts to
crush us in this way are not succeeding.

The extent to which we have already vanquished capitalism in
the short time we have had at our disposal, and despite the
incredible difficulties under which we have had to work, will be
seen from the following summarised figures.
The Central Statistical Board has just prepared for the press
data on the production and consumption of grain—not for the
whole of Soviet Russia, but only for twenty-six gubernias.

The results are as follows:

26 gubernias of Soviet Russia

Population in millions

Production of grain (excluding seed and fodder) millions poods

Grain delivered, millions poods

Total amount of grain at disposal of population millions poods

Grain consumption, poods per capita

Commisariat of food

Profiteers

Producing gubernias Consuming gubernias

Urban 4.4 Rural 28.6 Urban5.9 Rural 13.8

—625.4—114.0

20.9—20.012.1

20.6—20.027.8

41.5481.840.0151.4

9.5
16.9
6.8
11.0

Total (26 gubernias)

52.7

739.4

53.0

68.4

714.7

13.6

Thus, approximately half the amount of grain supplied to the
cities is provided by the Commissariat of Food and the other
half by profiteers. This same proportion is revealed by a
careful survey, made in 1918, of the food consumed by city
workers. It should be borne in mind that for bread supplied by
the state the worker pays one-ninth of what he pays the
profiteer. The profiteering price for bread is ten
times greater than the state price; this is revealed by a
detailed study of workers’ budgets.

4

A careful study of the figures quoted shows that they present
an exact picture of the fundamental features of Russia’s
present-day economy.

The working people have been emancipated from their age-old
oppressors and exploiters, the landowners and capitalists. This
step in the direction of real freedom and real equality, a step
which for its extent, dimensions and rapidity is without parallel
in the world, is ignored by the supporters of the bourgeoisie
(including the petty-bourgeois democrats), who, when they talk of
freedom and equality, mean parliamentary bourgeois democracy,
which they falsely declare to be “democracy” in
general, or “pure democracy” (Kautsky).

But the working people are concerned only with real equality
and real freedom (freedom from the landowners and capitalists),
and that is why they give the Soviet government such solid
support.

In this peasant country it was the peasantry as a whole who
were the first to gain, who gained most, and gained immediately
from the dictatorship of the proletariat. The peasant in Russia
starved under the landowners and capitalists. Throughout the long
centuries of our history, the peasant never had an opportunity to
work for himself: he starved while handing over hundreds of
millions of poods of grain to the capitalists, for the cities and
for export. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat the peasant
for the first time has been working for himself and
feeding better than the city dweller. For the first time
the peasant has seen real freedom—freedom to eat his bread,
freedom from starvation. In the distribution of the land, as we
know, the maximum equality has been established; in the vast
majority of cases the peasants are dividing the land according to
the number of “mouths to feed”.

Socialism means the abolition of classes.

In order to abolish classes it is necessary, first, to
overthrow the landowners and capitalists. This part of our task
has been accomplished, but it is only a part, and moreover,
not the most difficult part. In order to abolish classes
it is necessary, secondly, to abolish the difference between
factory worker and peasant, to make workers of all of
them. This cannot be done all at once. This task is
incomparably more difficult and will of necessity take a long
time. It is not a problem that can be solved by overthrowing a
class. It can be solved only by the organisational reconstruction
of the whole social economy, by a transition from individual,
disunited, petty commodity production to large-scale social
production. This transition must of necessity be extremely
protracted. It may only be delayed and complicated by hasty and
incautious administrative and legislative measures. It can be
accelerated only by affording such assistance to the peasant as
will enable him to effect an immense improvement in his whole
farming technique to reform it radically.

In order to solve the second and most difficult part of the
problem, the proletariat, after having defeated the bourgeoisie,
must unswervingly conduct its policy towards the peasantry along
the following fundamental lines. The proletariat must separate,
demarcate the working peasant from the peasant owner, the peasant
worker from the peasant huckster, the peasant who labours from the
peasant who profiteers.

In this demarcation lies the whole essence of
socialism.

And it is not surprising that the socialists who are
socialists in word but petty-bourgeois democrats in deed (the
Martovs, the Chernovs, the Kautskys and others) do not understand
this essence of socialism.

The demarcation we here refer to is an extremely difficult
one, because in real life all the features of the
“peasant”, however diverse they may be, however
contradictory they may be, are fused into one whole. Nevertheless,
demarcation is possible; and not only is it possible, it
inevitably follows from the conditions of peasant farming and
peasant life. The working peasant has for ages been oppressed by
the landowners, the capitalists, the hucksters and profiteers and
by their state, including even the most democratic
bourgeois republics. Throughout the ages the working peasant has
trained himself to hate and loathe these oppressors and
exploiters, and this “training”, engendered by the
conditions of life, compels the peasant to seek an
alliance with the worker against the capitalist and against the
profiteer and huckster. Yet at the same time, economic conditions,
the conditions of commodity production, inevitably turn the
peasant (not always, but in the vast majority of cases) into a
huckster and profiteer.

The statistics quoted above reveal a striking difference
between the working peasant and the peasant profiteer. That
peasant who during 1918-19 delivered to the hungry workers of the
cities 40,000,000 poods of grain at fixed state prices, who
delivered this grain to the state agencies despite all the
shortcomings of the latter, shortcomings fully realised by the
workers’ government, but which were unavoidable in the first
period of the transition to socialism—that peasant is a
working peasant, the comrade and equal of the socialist worker,
his most faithful ally, his blood brother in the fight against the
yoke of capital. Whereas that peasant who clandestinely sold
40,000,000 poods of grain at ten times the state price, taking
advantage of the need and hunger of the city worker, deceiving the
state, and everywhere increasing and creating deceit, robbery and
fraud—that peasant is a profiteer, an ally of the
capitalist, a class enemy of the worker, an exploiter. For whoever
possesses surplus grain gathered from land belonging to the whole
state with the help of implements in which in one way or another
is embodied the labour not only of the peasant but also of the
worker and so on— whoever possesses a surplus of grain and
profiteers in that grain is an exploiter of the hungry
worker.

You are violators of freedom, equality, and
democracy—they shout at us on all sides, pointing to the
inequality of the worker and the peasant under our Constitution,
to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, to the forcible
confiscation of surplus grain, and so forth. We reply—never
in the world has there been a state which has done so much to
remove the actual inequality, the actual lack of freedom from
which the working peasant has been suffering for centuries. But we
shall never recognise equality with the peasant profiteer, just as
we do not recognise “equality” between the exploiter
and the exploited, between the sated and the hungry, nor the
“freedom” for the former to rob the latter. And those
educated people who refuse to recognise this difference we shall
treat as whiteguards, even though they may call themselves
democrats, socialists, internationalists, Kautskys, Chernovs, or
Martovs.

5

Socialism means the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of
the proletariat has done all it could to abolish classes. But
classes cannot be abolished at one stroke.

And classes still remain and will remain in
the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship
will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the
dictatorship of the proletariat they will not disappear.

Classes have remained, but in the era of the dictatorship of
the proletariat every class has undergone a change, and
the relations between the classes have also changed. The class
struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the
proletariat; it merely assumes different forms.

Under capitalism the proletariat was an oppressed class, a
class which had been deprived of the means of production, the only
class which stood directly and completely opposed to the
bourgeoisie, and therefore the only one capable of being
revolutionary to the very end. Having overthrown the bourgeoisie
and conquered political power, the proletariat has become the
ruling class; it wields state power, it exercises control
over means of production already socialised; it guides the
wavering and intermediary elements and classes; it crushes the
increasingly stubborn resistance of the exploiters. All these are
specific tasks of the class struggle, tasks which the
proletariat formerly did not and could not have set itself.

The class of exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, has
not disappeared and cannot disappear all at once under the
dictatorship of the proletariat. The exploiters have been smashed,
but not destroyed. They still have an inter national base in the
form of international capital, of which they are a branch. They
still retain certain means of production in part, they still have
money, they still have vast social connections. Because they have
been defeated, the energy of their resistance has increased a
hundred and a thousandfold. The “art” of state,
military and economic administration gives them a superiority, and
a very great superiority, so that their importance is incomparably
greater than their numerical proportion of the population. The
class struggle waged by the overthrown exploiters against the
victorious vanguard of the exploited, i.e., the proletariat, has
become incomparably more bitter. And it cannot be otherwise in the
case of a revolution, unless this concept is replaced (as it is by
all the heroes of the Second International) by reformist
illusions.

Lastly, the peasants, like the petty bourgeoisie in general,
occupy a half-way, intermediate position even under the
dictatorship of the proletariat: on the one hand, they are a
fairly large (and in backward Russia, a vast) mass of working
people, united by the common interest of all working people to
emancipate themselves from the landowner and the capitalist; on
the other hand, they are disunited small proprietors,
property-owners and traders. Such an economic position inevitably
causes them to vacillate between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie. In view of the acute form which the struggle between
these two classes has assumed, in view of the incredibly severe
break up of all social relations, and in view of the great
attachment of the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie generally to
the old, the routine, and the unchanging, it is only natural that
we should inevitably find them swinging from one side to the
other, that we should find them wavering, changeable, uncertain,
and so on.

In relation to this class—or to these social
elements—the proletariat must strive to establish its
influence over it, to guide it. To give leadership to the
vacillating and unstable—such is the task of the
proletariat.

If we compare all the basic forces or classes and their
interrelations, as modified by the dictatorship of the
proletariat, we shall realise how unutterably nonsensical and
theoretically stupid is the common petty-bourgeois idea shared by
all representatives of the Second International, that the
transition to socialism is possible “by means of
democracy” in general. The fundamental source of this error
lies in the prejudice inherited from the bourgeoisie that
“democracy” is something absolute and above
classes. As a matter of fact, democracy itself passes into an
entirely new phase under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and
the class struggle rises to a higher level, dominating over each
and every form.

General talk about freedom, equality and democracy is in fact
but a blind repetition of concepts shaped by the relations of
commodity production. To attempt to solve the concrete problems of
the dictatorship of the proletariat by such generalities is
tantamount to accepting the theories and principles of the
bourgeoisie in their entirety.
From the point of view of the proletariat, the question can be
put only in the following way: freedom from oppression by which
class? equality of which class with which? democracy based on
private property, or on a struggle for the abolition of private
property?—and so forth.

Long ago Engels in his Anti-Dühring explained
that the concept “equality” is moulded from the
relations of commodity production; equality becomes a prejudice if
it is not understood to mean the abolition of
classes. This elementary truth regarding the distinction
between the bourgeois-democratic and the socialist conception of
equality is constantly being forgotten. But if it is not forgotten
it becomes obvious that by overthrowing the bourgeoisie the
proletariat takes the most decisive step towards the abolition of
classes, and that in order to complete the process the proletariat
must continue its class struggle, making use of the apparatus of
state power and employing various methods of combating,
influencing and bringing pressure to bear on the overthrown
bourgeoisie and the vacillating petty bourgeoisie.

(To be continued)

[This article remained
unfinished—editor]

October 30, 1919

Endnotes

[1] The number of “state farms” and “agricultural communes” in Soviet Russia is, as far as is known, 3,536 and 1,96l respectively, and the number of agricultural artels is 3,696. Our Central Statistical Board is at present taking an exact census of all state farms and communes. The results will begin coming in in November 1919.